- [Voiceover] A bump map, or a normal map,achieve the effect of fine surface detail, or relief.But they don't actually deform the surface,they don't change the shape of the model.On the other hand, a displacement map does.It deforms the model by moving the verticesaccording to the brightness level of an input map.We'll use a displacement map to imparta subtle asymmetry or chaos to the Athena body model.Let's open up the material editor,And we've got our body physical material here.

And it currently has no displacement map feeding it.Let's use the displacement output of this substance.Click and drag from displacement on the substance map,over to displacement map on the physical material.And a new output selector map is created in between them.Double click on its thumbnailand it looks like we've just got a flat grey field here.This is the default behavior of substance.It doesn't actually output anythingat this displacement output here.

Let's go into the substance material parameters.Double click on the label,and in the material parameters,you'll see something labelled 'relief balance'.And that's the balance betweendisplacement and bump, or normal.And at the default value of 32,all of the relief information is being sent intothe bump and normal channels,and none of it is being sent into displacement.If we use a low relief value of let's say two,that should illustrate what's gonna happen here.

With a low value, we're sendingthe balance to the displacement channel.And we've got a noise patternthat's pretty high frequency here.If we look in the bump or normal,there's still something there,and it's also very high frequency,but it's kinda dimmed out and hard to see.What's a good value for this?I'm gonna split the difference herewith a relief balance value of 16.And that gives me a low frequency displacement,and a high frequency bump or normal channel.

If we render this now, we will see a displacement.But we won't see anything in the viewportuntil we add a modifier.Let's do that.I'll minimize the material editor.Select the Athena body object.Go into the modify panel.And in the modifier list,choose world space modifiers, displace mesh WSM.As soon as you add that, the model goes crazy,because the displacement amount is up too high.

Let's go back into our material editor.Double click on the physical material.Scroll down in the material parameters,and reduce the displacement amount topoint zero three.And then go back to the modify panel,and click update mesh.To see the effect of displacement turning on and off,Let's pin the stack.Click on the push pin icon.And then deselect the object with control D.

Then we can toggle this eye iconto see the difference between no displacement,and some displacement.And as you can see, displacement ispushing all the vertices outward.And when we do it this way,that's our only option.We can't actually push vertices inward at all.But we can make adjustmentsto the displacement map itself.Go back to slate,and we can pipe this displacement mapthrough an output map.Here it is under maps general output, drag that over.

And then pipe the map output selector into the output.And then the output, into displacement.Double click on those thumbnails to maximize them.Double click on the output map label to load itinto the material parameters.And in the output section,we can crush the blacks by bringingthe RGB offset value into a negative range.Set that to a value of negative point five and press enter.And now you can see we've crushed those blacks down.

And we've actually lost all the detailin that area of the noise.Let's bring this up, let's brighten that a bit,by increasing the output amount to three,and press enter.Now we've got a pretty high contrast noise pattern,and it does correspond to this other noise pattern.This is a very high-frequency high-detail one.And this is a low-frequency low-detail pattern,that's suitable for our simple displacement.We'll go back to the modify panel,and click update mesh.

And then we can toggle the stateof that displace mesh binding modifier.So there it is with it on, and off.We've just added a little bit of subtle displacementto make it not perfectly symmetrical.And that's the most basic wayto apply displacement in 3DS Max.There are more complicated waysinvolving subdivision displacement,but in this case all we need is just todeviate the position of the existing verticesjust a little bit.

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Released

10/4/2016

Physically based rendering (PBR) simulates the way light works in the real world. It achieves greater realism with less effort than traditional 3D rendering. This course focuses on PBR shading techniques in 3ds Max, using the Physical Material to achieve photorealistic surfaces such as stone, glass, and metal. Author Aaron F. Ross also looks at building shading networks, and combining and adjusting maps in interesting ways. Procedural maps such as ambient occlusion and substance deserve special attention, and you'll also see how to bake them out to bitmap files for cross-application and renderer compatibility. By the end of the course, you'll have a firm foundation in advanced shading workflows in 3ds Max.